Just wandering through some saved links this morning and found myself drifting back to the Caribbean. I was happy to re-visit a blog site for a photog friend who lives and shoots there full time. Josh is dialed into the local scene and has an eye for beauty on an island that is provides it at every turn. If you want to take a virtual trip to Grenada and see some fantastic photography, take a look at Josh’s site “Modern Day Gilligan“. It is an explosion of color and scenic beauty from a jem of an island.

Marlin mag’s latest issue hit the news stands this week. Their choice for a cover photo always interest me and this issue is no exception. They chose the first frame in a sequence I captured last summer while riding along with Capt. Butch aboard the Prime Time in St. Thomas. Clearly this first frame is the best choice, since the composition goes south as the fish flattens out during the second half of the jump. To see the entire motor drive sequence, click the image above to start the movie. This shows that you don’t need all the bells and whistles in a fancy digital camera motor drive, you could shoot this sport with a single shot. What do you think?

I recently decided to treat myself to some more memory cards. With file sizes ever expanding, my old collection of 1, 2, and 4 GB cards were seeming a bit small during some days offshore when the action heated up. Add the occasional movie clip to that and those cards fill up fast. So I surfed around and found an attractive offer for a two pack of Lexar 300x UDMA 16 GB CF cards. They arrived one week ahead of my departure for a photo shoot in the Yucatan. Plenty of time to test them out. Luckily I did since one failed after just a few captures/dumps/formats. Although the matching card is still working now, I sure can’t trust it to do any better. So after a tech call to Bombay, where they diagnosed the sick card to be in need of replacement, I was transferred to Lexar customer service in Boise. They couldn’t have been more helpful. Normally exchanges are only done with the company where you purchase the item (Adorama). They not only offered to exchange both cards just in case, they are even overnighting the two replacement cards to me in time to make the upcoming trip to Mexico. Maybe my subtle hints of how happy and trouble free my SanDisk experience has been going all these years had something to do with it?  Fingers crossed…

UPDATE – The replacement cards arrived on time as promised in time for my trip. I shot for 8 days exclusively with these two cards and loved it. It’s so nice to have plenty of space. The Lexar cards performed fast and flawless.

Interesting news out of Hollywood today – The season finale of the U.S. TV series House, airing tonight (Monday, May 17 (8:00-9:01 PM ET/PT)), was captured with Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II. This makes it “the first network television prime time drama episode to be shot entirely on a Digital SLR camera,” says a Canon USA press release. In addition to shooting the episode on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EF lenses were used for a complete Canon workflow for image capture. Recording every second of footage to compact flash cards, the crew for HOUSE took full advantage of a completely digital workflow and was able to complete filming the entire episode in just 10 days. That is pretty amazing how far the DSLR has come. Yikes, why does it take me several weeks to edit a batch of fish pictures?

PTA – Planes Trains Automobiles

While working on the seemingly never ending process of adding stock photos from my collection to my new web site, I thought I would try a theme. The results is a new Gallery Collection titled Transportation. This collection consists of three galleries; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Stronger in some topics more than others, I was still surprised how many shots I had to display for this collection.

The Isla images have been prepped and uploaded. 300 new sail fishing images are now available on my web site www.AquaPaparazzi.com. Some great jumping shots and really cool feeding Frigate Bird stuff. This process of posting fresh images from a recent international photo safari to my new web site went so quick and smooth, this would be a good time to praise and plug my new web hosting company. Several months ago I researched a dozen hosting companies and settled on PhotoShelter as the clear winner. You can click on this link to save some money on sign-up, and I get an account credit too! PhotoShelter is a company built by photographers, for photographers. And on that front, they really seem to offer a product that is ideal for the upload and display of a large collection of digital images. Check it out and let me know what you think.